What are the most profitable copywriting niches?

Niche is a fancy way of saying types. Here are the most common types of copywriting.

However, that list doesn’t include industries, which are more realistic indicators of profitability.

You can write copy in any industry, but not all of them have high returns. For example, you can be a copywriter in the hospitality industry or a copywriter in the healthcare industry. In both jobs, you’ll be writing landing pages, SEO pages, ebooks, social media copy, and detailed documentation. Regardless of what you write and how well you write it, your earning will vary massively because one industry has high-paying more jobs than the other.

However, high-paying isn’t necessarily popular. It sounds cool that you might write about travel and hotels, but it may not pay you as much as writing about software systems or medical equipment. 

(Don’t come after me, because I don’t have stats to prove it. I’m just using my common sense. Didn’t I say this is an opinion blog?)

That said, the most profitable industries are also the ones that require formal qualifications like healthcare, legal counselling, finance, and technology.

What’s interesting, though, is that those core industries have sub-level industries that don’t necessarily require the same qualifications. For example, to write about medicines and the best practices of administering them, you might need formal training in pharmaceuticals. But to write about food and nutrition, you’ll need a different certification. The same goes for fitness-based copywriting. These sub-level industries still pay well, but the training you need is significantly more accessible. Not everyone can afford a degree in orthodontics, whereas nutrition science is more affordable and is even available online. The best part? All of them fall into the health and wellness bucket.

Consider technology. Regardless of whether you’re a software engineer or an MBA graduate, you can write extensive help documentation for a piece of software. What unifies the two formal qualifications is that they work in the same industry and, with the same output, earn the same amount of money.

Technology is an umbrella term that includes hundreds of micro-specialities such as bitcoin, database software, HTML, gadgets, iOS and Android, and even solar battery development. Though the tech industry is high-paying, how much you earn will vary based on the micro-speciality you write for.

Which opens up another conundrum—time. Thanks to Elon Musk, space technology, cryptocurrency, and solar engineering are popular sub-industries right now. But that wasn’t always the case. Even until five years ago, these technologies weren’t as on-demand as they are now. There’s a massive wage difference between writers who reported on bitcoin 10 years ago versus 5 years ago versus now.

It’s naive to think that particular copywriting niches guarantee successful career.s With the world changing every few hours, the only way to ensure a sustainable copywriting career is to accept that you may shift from one specialty to another throughout your career. In most cases, this is quite a small shift, like transitioning from writing about the top mobile phones to the latest home improvement gadgets. They’re different, but not so much that they drive you crazy or bankrupt.